Tanking feels unimportant

[Psytic]

I love it. I never tanked before now I can actually do it and its chill. I dont like that for some classes I need to look up a Visio chart to figure out how to play them. I cant think of any other game I need to do this. Id rather have the challenge come from boss mechanics then struggling to play my own class. I'm just a filthy casual though so I don't know. I dont know what they did to healer I used to love it but I dont enjoy it anymore its not as relaxing as it used to be so I play tank. I dont play this game to be on the edge of my seat stressed out by my rotation on every pull on normal difficulty, they can save that for savage. I just want to relax after work play some roulette unwind. The barrier to entry should never be too high for the average person for general non savage play. I hope they dont design around the hardcore minority. Have a few classes every role for those savage types but not all.

[DRKoftheAzure]

I love it. I never tanked before now I can actually do it and its chill. I dont like that for some classes I need to look up a Visio chart to figure out how to play them. I cant think of any other game I need to do this. Id rather have the challenge come from boss mechanics then struggling to play my own class. I'm just a filthy casual though so I don't know. I dont know what they did to healer I used to love it but I dont enjoy it anymore its not as relaxing as it used to be so I play tank. I dont play this game to be on the edge of my seat stressed out by my rotation on every pull on normal difficulty, they can save that for savage. I just want to relax after work play some roulette unwind. The barrier to entry should never be too high for the average person for general non savage play. I hope they dont design around the hardcore minority. Have a few classes every role for those savage types but not all.

I actually had to learn how to tank in FF14 through the more social aspect of the game(i.e. video guides, websites that give a basic rundown of the role and job/class that you are playing, etc.) during Heavensward and this was when Cross Class skills was still a thing, and I firmly believe that we should have more cross class skills to choose from going into Stormblood while also focusing more on traits.

Now there is nothing wrong with Role action system, but if it was going to be in the game, we should have kept cross class skills and all the devs had to say was "Hey guys we're going to inevitably remove cross class but we are going to phase it out over time for role action" so that way tanks/healers/Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged and certain melee DPS wouldn't have to feel like the same thing with nothing to differentiate them like they do now(basically DRK, WHM/AST, each individual Physical ranged, MNK and NIN failing "the duck test").

And tank stance were the training wheels of the role whereas DPS stance (for both tanks and healers) was without the training wheels, which is now lost to time because someone at Square-Enix was getting their best quarterly earnings, or Yoshi-P hated tanks and healers having DPS stance for whatever reason.

[Psytic]

I actually had to learn how to tank in FF14 through the more social aspect of the game(i.e. video guides, websites that give a basic rundown of the role and job/class that you are playing, etc.) during Heavensward and this was when Cross Class skills was still a thing, and I firmly believe that we should have more cross class skills to choose from going into Stormblood while also focusing more on traits.

Now there is nothing wrong with Role action system, but if it was going to be in the game, we should have kept cross class skills and all the devs had to say was "Hey guys we're going to inevitably remove cross class but we are going to phase it out over time for role action" so that way tanks/healers/Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged and certain melee DPS wouldn't have to feel like the same thing with nothing to differentiate them like they do now(basically DRK, WHM/AST, each individual Physical ranged, MNK and NIN failing "the duck test").

And tank stance were the training wheels of the role whereas DPS stance (for both tanks and healers) was without the training wheels, which is now lost to time because someone at Square-Enix was getting their best quarterly earnings, or Yoshi-P hated tanks and healers having DPS stance for whatever reason.

Id like if they had a talent tree. It could be the answer to pruning. They could let you pick a handful of talented abilities you want to run with and that way you can spec out differently for different content. Give people some choice without overloading the amount of buttons.

[Brannagh]

It's probly been suggested before, but I'd enjoy it if a portion of mitigation came from self buffs for completing combos. Samurai, Monk, and Dragoon all have a portion of their play focused on insuring self-generated buffs don't expire and how they gain those buffs ties into the mechanics of their gameplay (identity).

I'm not talking dramatic here, but balanced in a way that cool downs are still used decisively. The idea would be that untrained tanks could still accomplish the casual content, but keeping the buffs up gives the healer more of a break. It'd open things up to a bit of diversity, like PLD combo-ing for a heal strength buff, DRK combo-ing for a small regen effect, WAR stacking max health buffs.

Not proposing very seriously here. As a new player, my progression from newbie to several lvl80's just felt I got some enjoyment out of hitting those DPS rotations to make sure my damage ups and skill speed ups stayed applied and it was part of feeling skilled and optimized as a DPS, but the only similar experience for tank is making sure you aren't animation locked to pop cool downs for mitigating busters.

[ReiMakoto]

It's probly been suggested before, but I'd enjoy it if a portion of mitigation came from self buffs for completing combos. Samurai, Monk, and Dragoon all have a portion of their play focused on insuring self-generated buffs don't expire and how they gain those buffs ties into the mechanics of their gameplay (identity).

I'm not talking dramatic here, but balanced in a way that cool downs are still used decisively. The idea would be that untrained tanks could still accomplish the casual content, but keeping the buffs up gives the healer more of a break. It'd open things up to a bit of diversity, like PLD combo-ing for a heal strength buff, DRK combo-ing for a small regen effect, WAR stacking max health buffs.

Not proposing very seriously here. As a new player, my progression from newbie to several lvl80's just felt I got some enjoyment out of hitting those DPS rotations to make sure my damage ups and skill speed ups stayed applied and it was part of feeling skilled and optimized as a DPS, but the only similar experience for tank is making sure you aren't animation locked to pop cool downs for mitigating busters.

Tanks used to have these debuffs through storms path, rage of halone and old delerium, so because they've been pruned I doubt they'd come back. 2 of them, path and halone, also existed in an awkward spot because the debuff effect wasn't big enough to make a really noticable difference, so once you were on farm you optimised dps, drk was the exception cos delrium did more damage than soul eater if you couldnt dark arts soul eater

[Nedkel]

I love it. I never tanked before now I can actually do it and its chill. I dont like that for some classes I need to look up a Visio chart to figure out how to play them. I cant think of any other game I need to do this. Id rather have the challenge come from boss mechanics then struggling to play my own class. I'm just a filthy casual though so I don't know. I dont know what they did to healer I used to love it but I dont enjoy it anymore its not as relaxing as it used to be so I play tank. I dont play this game to be on the edge of my seat stressed out by my rotation on every pull on normal difficulty, they can save that for savage. I just want to relax after work play some roulette unwind. The barrier to entry should never be too high for the average person for general non savage play. I hope they dont design around the hardcore minority. Have a few classes every role for those savage types but not all.

You have nailed exactly everything what is wrong with tanking in this game. xD

Playing tanks is relaxing on first 100-300 games, then you are going to lose a motivation to play the game altogether because of how boring and unimportant/not impactful it is. When i play a tank today and force myself to do alliance raid i already have enough after second boss. I legitimately leaved my raid last time and gone to sleep, i am so feed up playing tanks in this game that i started to play pay2win mmos and have more fun playing them than ffxiv.
The longer you play a tank in this game the more you realize its actually not casual friendly at all, its too boring there is nothing to do apart from dungeons, content for casuals is limited to the minimum. Basically 1 alliance raid, few dungeons and nothing else if you are not into serious raiding.

[Psytic]

You have nailed exactly everything what is wrong with tanking in this game. xD

Playing tanks is relaxing on first 100-300 games, then you are going to lose a motivation to play the game altogether because of how boring and unimportant/not impactful it is. When i play a tank today and force myself to do alliance raid i already have enough after second boss. I legitimately leaved my raid last time and gone to sleep, i am so feed up playing tanks in this game that i started to play pay2win mmos and have more fun playing them than ffxiv.
The longer you play a tank in this game the more you realize its actually not casual friendly at all, its too boring there is nothing to do apart from dungeons, content for casuals is limited to the minimum. Basically 1 alliance raid, few dungeons and nothing else if you are not into serious raiding.

I was playing Archeage Unchained and sailing around fishing and fighting players that were pirates and farming, raising livestock, running trade routes across the ocean with my ship etc. before I got back into this game. FFXIV is the theme parkest theme park for sure. I play this game because its not an uncapped range based gear grind where if you go catch up on your single player catalog your left in the dust like BDO and Archeage. I can dip in play dungeons grind out tokens to catch up and pretty much play as casually as I want. That said I agree this game could use some more sandbox features and things outside of dungeons. I'm hoping this ocean fishing they are adding next patch is on the level of the other two aforementioned games but for me it doesn't bother me that much since I dabble in other games as well.

[Shurrikhan]

Id like if they had a talent tree. It could be the answer to pruning. They could let you pick a handful of talented abilities you want to run with and that way you can spec out differently for different content. Give people some choice without overloading the amount of buttons.

Unless made incredibly well (as in, there are next to no functional examples available across all MMORPGs, even per a particular tier of a particular expansion for a particular class) where multiple builds are optimal. Even then, a talent tree on its own only gives you the choice of what you want to prune from yourself, and limits your options to, typically, the most exciting choices. You can have exciting choices 1 and 2 of the 8, or 3 and 6, or... so on. Isn't it better generally to just have more intelligent button usage designs in the first place, pick a theme and build, and make the most of it instead of spreading the class thin in attempting to support for the sake of choice?

To be clear, I am generally an advocate of things like talent trees... as tools of character progression, world-building, and character-world interactions. But, they are among the poorest solutions for combating bloat, which is the only way it'd be able to replace pruning anyways.

[testname]

Unless made incredibly well (as in, there are next to no functional examples available across all MMORPGs, even per a particular tier of a particular expansion for a particular class) where multiple builds are optimal. Even then, a talent tree on its own only gives you the choice of what you want to prune from yourself, and limits your options to, typically, the most exciting choices. You can have exciting choices 1 and 2 of the 8, or 3 and 6, or... so on. Isn't it better generally to just have more intelligent button usage designs in the first place, pick a theme and build, and make the most of it instead of spreading the class thin in attempting to support for the sake of choice?

To be clear, I am generally an advocate of things like talent trees... as tools of character progression, world-building, and character-world interactions. But, they are among the poorest solutions for combating bloat, which is the only way it'd be able to replace pruning anyways.

Check Path of Exile

[Quor]

Check Path of Exile

That's not an MMO, that's an ARPG. Even then, there are meta builds. Melee builds have always been severely underadvantaged compared anything else with the only viable ones having stupid amounts of range or else so much survivability that it takes an hour to kill anything at end game.

Talent trees, as nice as they can be in theory, don't work in terms of maintaining any kind of balance. There is always a "best" build. While that build may change on a per-encounter basis, that just means people will clamor for a way to change their builds so they will always be at their "best" when playing, or else complain endlessly about how they aren't "best" at every encounter, how it removes skill from the equation etc. Which defeats the entire point of having choices. If choices aren't meaningful, then they're worthless. If choices are meaningful, then it means by definition that there is a "good" choice and a "bad" choice, which brings us back to the "best" build problem. People have crapped on others for not having the "best" talent build in a variety of games. FF14 wouldn't be an exception, despite people such as myself existing to advocate against that kind of thing.

tl;dr turning this game into WoW won't make anything better, it'll just make it worse.